Things I wish I’d known about CSS

Re:Things I wish I’d known about CSS by cosmodisk on Friday July 17, 2020 @10:30AM (#23870857)

Couldn't agree more. I had less issues learning multiple programming languages,some challenging concepts around them and yet when it comes to CSS, most resources aren't very useful. You do something and it doesn't work. You check documentation and it show exactly the same thing that does work. 5 hours later it turns out it was some overriding property+ browser incompatibility+ weird undocumented exception. Very few books do deliver on their promise either. I don't know,maybe it's just me but the whole ecosystem is a bit weird.

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Re:Things I wish I’d known about CSS by hutzlibu on Friday July 17, 2020 @06:29PM (#23876720)

" but the whole ecosystem is a bit weird."

It absolutely is.

The web was meant for static documents and some link magic.

Now allmost every complex programm can run in the browser with web technologies. And in the time between you had lots of powerful organisations with their own agenda, as well as millions of single developers with a agenda and a loud voice. How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?

Besides, it would be very hard, to make a clean spec that satisfies the needs of the whole population. So by now I say, all in all, it works pretty good.

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Re:Things I wish I’d known about CSS by Silhouette on Friday July 17, 2020 @07:54PM (#23877454)

How could a sane, clear spec be made, under these circumstances?

Serious answer: By respecting and supporting the organisation that had for a long time codified realistic web standards reasonably well. When the Web was younger, you could (and many of us did) learn all you needed to know about things like HTML and CSS by reading the documentation produced by the W3C. In many cases, the official recommendations themselves (the documents that were informally called "web standards") were very readable and short enough for normal developers to go through the whole thing.

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Re:Things I wish I’d known about CSS by hutzlibu on Saturday July 18, 2020 @05:34AM (#23880216)

My experience with the W3C was very complicated written specs, with sometimes no connection to reality(implementation in the browsers). And they moved too slow.

And no. I don't think you can expect the whole world to wait for some spec commitee.

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Re:Things I wish I’d known about CSS by Silhouette on Saturday July 18, 2020 @06:26AM (#23880395)

It wasn't that way in the earlier days. The W3C certainly made some questionable decisions later on that contributed to its slide into irrelevance, but it was Google flagrantly ignoring standardisation, absurdities like "living standards", and the way all of the other major browser developers were asleep at the wheel for years that really sealed the W3C's fate. And now, sadly, a new generation of web developers is about to learn the hard way why browser monopolies are a bad idea. :-(

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Re:Things I wish I’d known about CSS by afarrell on Saturday July 18, 2020 @05:23AM (#23880170)

> the whole ecosystem is a bit weird

The whole ecosystem reminds me of why I did not study synthetic biology or medicine. I prefer the systems I work with not to have evolved but to have been designed by some intelligence with a limited memory for random details.

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